Posts Tagged “surveillance”
Posted by: admin in Police State, surveillance, tags: Advocacy Groups, Amnesty International, Ethical Treatment Of Animals, Federal Authorities, Human Rights Group, Intelligence Officers, Maryland State Police, Peaceful Protest, People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals, Police Documents, Police Superintendent, Police Surveillance, Supremacist Group, surveillance, Surveillance Operation
Source: washingtonpost.com
The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored — and labeled as terrorists — activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes.
Intelligence officers created a voluminous file on Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling the group a “security threat” because of concerns that members would disrupt the circus. Angry consumers fighting a 72 percent electricity rate increase in 2006 were targeted. The DC Anti-War Network, which opposes the Iraq war, was designated a white supremacist group, without explanation.
One of the possible “crimes” in the file police opened on Amnesty International, a world-renowned human rights group: “civil rights.”
According to hundreds of pages of newly obtained police documents, the groups were swept into a broad surveillance operation that started in 2005 with routine preparations for the scheduled executions of two men on death row.
The operation has been called a “waste of resources” by the current police superintendent and “undemocratic” by the governor.
Police have acknowledged that the monitoring, which took place during the administration of then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), spiraled out of control, with an undercover trooper spending 14 months infiltrating peaceful protest groups. Troopers have said they inappropriately labeled 53 individuals as terrorists in their database, information that was shared with federal authorities. But the new documents reveal a far more expansive set of police targets and indicate that police did not close some files until late 2007.
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The surveillance ended with no arrests and no evidence of violent sedition. Instead, troopers are preparing to purge files and say they are expecting lawsuits.
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Source: The Guardian
The private sector will be asked to manage and run a communications database that will keep track of everyone’s calls, emails, texts and internet use under a key option contained in a consultation paper to be published next month by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.
A cabinet decision to put the management of the multibillion pound database of all UK communications traffic into private hands would be accompanied by tougher legal safeguards to guarantee against leaks and accidental data losses.
But in his strongest criticism yet of the superdatabase, Sir Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, who has firsthand experience of working with intelligence and law enforcement agencies, told the Guardian such assurances would prove worthless in the long run and warned it would prove a “hellhouse” of personal private information.
“Authorisations for access might be written into statute. The most senior ministers and officials might be designated as scrutineers. But none of this means anything,” said Macdonald. “All history tells us that reassurances like these are worthless in the long run. In the first security crisis the locks would loosen.”
The home secretary postponed the introduction of legislation to set up the superdatabase in October and instead said she would publish a consultation paper in the new year setting out the proposal and the safeguards needed to protect civil liberties. She has emphasised that communications data, which gives the police the identity and location of the caller, texter or web surfer but not the content, has been used as important evidence in 95% of serious crime cases and almost all security service operations since 2004 including the Soham and 21/7 bombing cases.
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Source: washingtonpost.com
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“The dynamics of an urban insurgency have resulted in a rapid increase in the number of activities visible in the video field of view,” according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Although the exploits of the Predator, the Global Hawk and other airborne collectors of information have been widely publicized, there are few authoritative descriptions of what they can see on the ground.
But some insights into the capabilities of the Predator and other aircraft can be drawn from a DARPA paper that describes the tasks of a contractor that will develop a method of indexing and rapidly finding video from archived aerial surveillance tapes collected over past years.
“The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems,” according to the DARPA paper, which was written in March but released last month.
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Source: money.co.uk
Credit card providers are to begin sharing detailed information about their customers in a bid to identify those who are struggling to repay their debts, it has been reported. According to the Guardian, the 17 credit card companies belonging to the UK payments association Apacs will exchange in-depth details about consumers’ repayment habits.
Currently, information such as how much customers are borrowing and whether they are making their repayments on time is shared, but under the new proposals companies would have access to additional details.
These would include the actual amounts being repaid each month and whether customers are using their cards to withdraw cash. Both of these are seen by Apacs as signs that consumers are struggling.
The organisation claims four percent of the nation’s credit card holders are facing financial problems, while 11 percent are paying just their minimum monthly repayments, risking further debt problems.
Apacs hopes the scheme - which forms part of a wider responsible lending initiative - will be in place by the end of this year, covering 97 percent of the UK credit card industry.
A study by researchers at the University of Warwick has revealed that the presence of a minimum repayment level on a credit card can act as a disincentive to pay off the balance in full, effectively extending the length of the debt.
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